Lecture 3 - Sylvia Nagl

Living in a trans-disciplinary and cross cultural world
Sylvia has a PhD in molecular and cell biology and is Head of Cancer Systems Science and Informatics at UCL (London)
Her interest spaces:
Complexity Theory and systems biology
New simulation method for complex systems and emergent processes networks
Bioethics, cultural theory and philosophy of science
Representations of the body in science art and culture
Embodiment
New media art
Nature/culture boundaries
Critique of science
A new philosophy/bioethics of complexity
www.ucl.ac.uk/cancer/research-groups/cancer-systems-science
Email: s.nagl@ucl.ac.uk
She began by showing us images of their building – a self-regulating building (a machine that regulates climate and atmosphere) and some images of geodesic domes from The Eden Project, built by the same architects who designer the UCL building.
Her presentation is called: Bio-splatter: A cross-cultural exploration
I want to share some thoughts with you about Bioart and some of the questions of systems biology might also be explored through Bioart. That is what I meant when I spoke of cultural explorations – the cultures of systems biology and of Bioart and media art and the cultures we bring to it all coming from different parts of the world.

Splatter – is a term that comes from literary and cinematic horror.
A representational moment in which the human body is torn apart and transformed – coherence of the body is irrevocably fragments.
The bodies that emerge triumphant at the conclusion foa splatter film are literally post-human, they punish the limits of the human body and they mark identities as always stitched sutured bloody at the seams – Judith Halberstam.

Cells, organisms and slime mould
There is a fascinating biological model that speaks to us. The slime mould is a modest amoeba that lives on leaves in compost and feeds on bacteria. If their food source becomes scarce some of the amoeba start signaling to the others “we have very low nutrients” – an alarm – chemical signals distributed by the cells and the amoeba come together and start to form an organism – during the process they make two different types of cells and they make a slug and send out spores that stick out of the leaves and they send out spores and the whole cycle begins again.

This leads us to the question:
What is the understanding of life?
There is a biological understanding, a scientific understanding, a technological understanding – and so there are contradictions about how we conceptualise life.
1. an old idea about organism as living animal
2. the scientific idea of the cell as the simplest living thing
3. life as an abstract phenomenon (it could appear in the material of the computer just as it appears in bodies)
4. life as a machine process that can be created by evolution-natural selection or by an engineer (biotechnology, systems biology, etc)

Life seems to be a multiple of phenomena.
Good old fashioned organisms and animals.
Macromolecular based cells - you know it when you have it in a test tube
Abstract/artificial life – life as a space time pattern that realizes some formal properties of biosystems in computers and other artificial media
Robotic life – robots, animals, nano-robotic life

Life
Autonomy – self law, to be in charge, self determined principles, duty of respecting others
Concept of organism –systems biology
Autopoiesis (Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela) – self production, organization, compensation of deformations, at the centre of understanding human beings

Mukund: Does this mean that life had to arise by itself at some point of time?
Sylvia: Yes, yes.
Zack: Can one engineer autonomous organisms?
Sylvia: If you are engineering systems, what is generated has to have that quality to maintain itself.
Siraj: Origins of autopoeisis are not taken seriously by professional biologists – it came from Deleuze and Guattari and has much significance for artists.

Organisms are a special kind of individual
Uniqueness
Discrete body-ness and cohesion – (more or less) defined boundaries, parts should not “ooze out” into other individuals, while components of other individuals should not enter and become incorporated.
Organisms have some fuzziness around them so what is above is not absolute.
Organisation – the parts of the individual need to work together in a cohesive way (as a system)
In an organism the parts are formed for and from each other, some parts produce the others (Immanuel Kant)
Continuity – it should not fade in and out of existence – discrete and definable birth and death;can undergo extensive change but needs sufficient stability during its lifetime to stay as the same thing

Autonomy identity and meaningful worlds
Organisms are able to produce and internally defined identity
Biosemiosis – comes from the theory of science and semiotics applied to biology and this fuses with Maturana-Varela thoughts... it is a provocative space.
What do we mean by this? How do they create their own worlds of meaning – There is self production and thus you produce an identity and at the same time, there are boundaries which are entangled with what is around it.
Boundaries – membranes, skin, define inside and outside and actively channel interactions with environment – but organism performs many processes essential for its survival outside its boundaries (communication)
Meaningful patterns of interactions emerge fro the whole pattern of system-environment relations
Organisms create their own world of meanings

Organisms – systems not genetic programs
Constructivist interaction – biological information is generated by interaction across multiple levels and it does not reside in a static genome (genes control only bits and not the whole)
Genes are only part s of the dynamic whole, no central control
Interpenetration and mutual construction of organism and environment
Identity and meaningful world (semiotic, sign, systems, bio-semiotics)

Multi-cellular organisms are the exception rather than the rule
Most organisms on earth are unicellular
Multi-cellular organisms suppress the independence and propagation of subparts (cells) as a necessary strategy for maintaining functional integrity – individually – a meshwork of selfless selves (Varela)
Cells in multi-cellular organisms are systems but not organisms.
A great deal of autonomy has been given up.

Aggregates, groups and super organisms

Multi-cellular organisms seem to be exploring the world of possible interactions and functional couplings>>human explorations/bio arts
Human body is a symbiotic system of multiple species
Life as a global phenomenon, as a complex and extensive organization.
This makes things confounding at some levels – aspects of colony of two or three different cell types – lichen which is a symbiosis between different unicellular organisms, so there are these riddles.

Organisms
What are they special in? if you think of the different biological levels – cells, tissue, etc – it is the intersection between evolution and a self-organising lving entity. This is not a hard and fast rule.
“are special individuals in the biological hierarchy because they constitute the medium where evolutionary-environment ….

What is life?
Self-transformative potential of organisms
Butterfly metamorphosis
Genomes are dynamic entities.
Here so much transformation has occurred and yet the genomes are constant – without any engineering, genomes are through self organizing ability able to form many forms through the genetic materials.

Metamorphosis
Lies at the heart of our human lived experience and we encounter it everywhere in other organisms – birth, reproduction, ageing and death being recycled into other living organisms
Unfolding of forms in time and space
A sense of flux
POV on what happens is everyday shifting
Diversity even the uniqueness of the individuals experience
Indeterminacy of the individuals self – of our very identity

Stories of shape-shifting and transformation

Systems Biology Synthetic Biology
Bio art

Molecularisation of Life

This can be seen as a new topic or one building upon the other one.
We are increasingly thinking about the molecular properties – the DNA.

Systems biology
Biological complexity
Based on a current understanding of complex adaptive systems in general – physical, biological, social, technological – ranging from cells, bodies to social communities, ecological systems and the internet.
A network of many many individual components/entities
Metaphorical field of tissue

Complex systems
Have a huge number of components
Interact simultaneously in a rich number of parallel ways
Global emergent structures and processes (bottom up)
Positive and negative feedback
Emergence of higher level order from the local interactions
“robust yet fragile”

Systems Biology – the virtual physiological Human – the Heart Physiome
“model the whole body as a complex system”
The heart has already been modeled through this system
You move up from the molecular to the cell to the whole heart (bottom up)

Computing metaphor of biology
Life is computational
Assumption that informational aspect of life can be extracted from the material
A dualistic division between information and matter
A narrative construction from Enlightenment (Descartes – mechanism-mind-“body-mind”)
Implosion of the embodied complexities of living organisms onto the cleanliness of the purely formal digital genome – Whitelaw 2004
Is there a Cartesian revival going on? But doing that can also give us some understandings.
If one took this to the extreme then Whitelaw’s quote is critical. What are the consequences of seeing life like this – it can become reduced to logical components.

Autonomy and the artificial

Life as an abstract phenomenon (artificial life)

Computing metaphor-embodiment-bio art
Life as a creative medium
A medium of art and communication
“living matter and evolution as artist”
Growth, spontaneously generated levels of order, emergence as dynamical aspects of arts practice
New metaphorical languages, new behaviours, new environments, new realities
Life as it could be (not life as we experience it)
A living system as art - art as a living system.
Information –based engineering of biological mechanisms and-or engagement with an “embodied creative process” as a model for artistic practice.
New models can emerge?

To understand life as expressions of the autonomy of some material embodied systems
What are its conditions and scope of possibility
What are the processes able to originate autonomy – new ways to think life and organize it
Suggests other possible assemblages
The body becomes bricolage
Organisms and cells – life as an embodied process that can be created by evolution-natural selection or by an engineer
Robots
Bioart
Artificial life
Nanoart

Minimal autonomy and synthetic biology
Ultimate goal is to build engineered biological systems – complete fabrication of living beings
Modification of existing unicellular organisms
Minimal artificial organisms or protocells
Artificial life in vitro aims to synthesize minimal systems from basic molecular components

BIOBRICKS – MIT
Standardize genetic parts with known performance
Characteristics – analogous to the transistors, capacitors, resitors used in electronics
Bioengineering

Systems biology Synthetic biology
Evolution Design
Complexity Abstracts away from complexity
Network Gene
System Circuit board
Emergence Parts/bricks
Introduction of foreign geners Artificial genomes
Cells Entirely new entities

IN ART IN ART
Emergent and generative processes
Accelerated evolution Mutating
Entities plus as aesthetic objects/evocative objects of cultural discussion (Oron) Splitting
Biopolitics Fusing
Subject/object doubling
Identity/hybridity

Disassembling and reconstructing
Only something deterritorialised is capable of reproducing itself – Delueze and Guattari a 1000 plateaus
Dissolves into molecular informational processes, codes, feedback systems and programs
Recontextualsiation of biological components and processes in new entities
Spontaneous assemblage of populations of atoms molecules cells
Intensification fo the flows of matter-energy-information

Swarms of cooperative molecular entities
A human being is actually a giant swarm or more precisely it is a swarm of swarms because each organ – blood liver kidneys is a separate swarm. What we refer …

Life turns out to be fundamentally divisible and multiple
The splattering of life into parts (partial objects) asks us to recognize our own bodies as intersections between …(Milburn)

Ends with a quote from:
Manuel deLanda: A 1000 years of non linear history 2000
“In a very real sense, reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds. . . . Rocks and wind, germs and words, are all different manifestations of this dynamic material reality . . . different ways in which this single matter-energy expresses itself.”

Zack: I want to ask you about diversity and the primary individual at that level of organization.
Sylvia: You can go inwards or outwards to explore the extensions, the extent.
Ayisha: Can you elaborate on the gender aspect. Also, the contact with the mother and the nurture and the care of the mother and neurons are triggered and how do you figure something as abstract as love as the glue.
Sylvia: This for me has to do with embodiment. This is something that is extracted away completely if life is made in to a set of formal processes. Love and other affective ways of being in the world – perhaps one can say that this presentation was intended to provoke such questions too. These questions must be brought to engagement.
Vasanthi: What you are talking of connects to Helen Cisoux and the talk of the oozing of the body, boundaries, etc.
Life disappears from the interior of the organism. Can you explain?
Sylvia: Something is taken out of the embodied and it becomes part of a formal process. If you lose this you lose the interiority, the subjective experience, the identity.
Gabe: Mentions the mitochondrial action that links baby closer to mom.
Mukund: The things that go from the stomach go from mother to child – mitochondria plus thousands of organisms. It has to do more than just mitochondria.
Oron: It has to do with notions of the self.
Ayisha: The work we often see in Bioart goes back to 60s performance artists etc and I have been seeing Orlan and Stelarc – it hasn’t seem to strengthen itself. Is it because the discourse was so much more expansive in the 60-70s and included so many other aspects of being human.
Orlan: Its another generation and there is a new generation of artists and they see it differently.
Gabe: The new generation, I wonder, does it engage so much with human beings. Orlan and Stelarc are anthropomorphic.
Oron: The really radical things are happening in the labs – the artists are just figuring out to handle this. In the 60s all this stuff was just exploding – war movement, gender, etc – without so much splattering of the body.
Siraj: There is big shift also in how the discourse of art has shifted. Fluxus, Situationism – the way society has moved on in a very professional way has affected way we make culture.
Yashas: They were more loose then.
Ayisha: There is a different culture of protest here. We can’t reproduce Fluxus or the Situationists here.
(ends)